Why is everything getting worse?

It's easy to look at the world of education and see a succession of worrying trends. But is that right? And why does it keep happening?

Here is a story. The world of education is in crisis. Behaviour is declining, kids are ground down by exams, the mental health of young people is falling off a cliff edge, and the system is endlessly squeezed by government budgets that don’t prioritise it. We live in a time menaced by AI and smartphones.

Here is another story. Education in England is a rare policy success. Our standing in the PISA rankings is improving, the skills of teachers are better than ever, standards in schools are increasing. We live in a time of AI opportunity.

I’ve read both of these stories recently. In fact, I’ve read both of them a number of times. And at the same time I’ve been Head of School at a large secondary in Sunderland, and I’ve taught children who seem approximately the same as the kids I’ve always taught.

I’ve written before about metrics, both here and in Exam Nation. They are seductive because of our desperate need to make sense of a chaotic world. They are powerful because they allow us to take some measure of control. They are destructive because they bend the world around themselves.

In my twenties, I remember encountering the story at the heart of Dava Sobel’s bestseller ‘Longitude’ for the first time. It tells of the attempt to create a seaworthy clock that would accurately measure time at a fixed reference point, so that navigators could compare that to the local time as measured by sun and stars and thus determine longitude. It blew my mind. It genuinely made me see the world differently, in that I understood for the first time the way in which the intellectual attempt to understand the world was dependent on a conceptual comparative framework. You cannot tell where you are without an accurate representation of where you have been, and a way of relating the two of them.

This is a particular problem in education. There are several uniquely infuriating quirks of the sector that make comparison Kafkaesque.

Let’s start with the relatively straightforward. Assessment is tricky. We try to do two things with it: measure ‘innate’ ability (our fixed point), and measure what has been learned (our current longitude). But every assessment of ability is influenced by teaching, and every assessment of what has been learned is influenced by the capacity and background of the child.

But this is compounded by the argument around what successful education is. Is it the knowledge already received and stored, and the capacity to conceptualise and recall it? Is it the ability to respond with ‘skill’ to new knowledge and circumstance? Is it the disposition and character created? Is it the nature of the experience had, and the way the memory of that experience will inform future choices? Depending on what you consider education to be, the nature of your fixed point might change.

This is all very abstract, though. It’s about education, not school. Understanding school is compounded by dozens of other practical difficulties. Which is more significant - an improvement in the ability to read, or a decline in the amount actually read? Has behaviour declined, or has our tolerance for bad behaviour changed? Have children changed, or have we?

This is where I start finding it nightmarish. Because, in education, everyone involved - teachers and students and parents - is both unique and constantly changing. I can talk to you about the fact that my perception is that behaviour is significantly better now, but that is coloured by the fact that I am significantly better at managing poor behaviour than I used to be. The children I teach now are different children to those I taught in 2002 when I started - shaped by different events, and formed by different stories. The behaviour they exhibit is good or bad in different ways, partly to do with their circumstances, partly to do with social and educational norms. The staff I work with were taught in different ways from my generation, and the curricula they teach are different as well. Getting a sense of perspective can feel like a scene from Mad Max, where the task is to jump from one moving vehicle to another while roaring at 100 miles an hour across the desert. All points that seem fixed are constantly moving.

More than anything, at the moment, I simply feel my age. When I look back, I look back on my own youth as well as on past practices, and that can make me both overly harsh and deeply nostalgic.

This is not just my random musing, though. There is in fact a deep flaw in the idea of applying scientific methodology to education. I don’t mean there is no science of learning, and I don’t mean there is no benefit to research. But Neil Postman, who seems very much of the moment (and who I’ve discussed before) talks about what he calls ‘Scientism’ in his book Technopoly. Initially, his concept simply seems like one of the many criticisms of social science methodology. And it is, in some ways. There’s a widely reported ‘replication crisis’ in a lot of social science research which indicates the possibility that, rather than following neat rules, we are far more beholden to the vagaries of circumstance in explaining human behaviour. But as I read, I realised Postman was taking aim at something more specific, and more interesting.

Take this example. Writing in 1992, Postman describes a piece of research which found that Asian Americans do better at school because they mostly come from intact families who value education. Postman’s a very eloquent writer, but in the interests of brevity, his response could be summed up as “duh!”. He gives other examples: research that concludes “those who value open-mindedness are more tolerant” or that “children who are inept at social relations tend to be unpopular with other children”. His conclusion is that the tenets of “Scientism” demand that for something to be true, it is not enough that it is logically or intuitively true - it must be demonstrated to be true by research.

For Postman, this is not only an amusing absurdity. It is something that cuts against the idea of moral judgement - something that removes the human element. Reading it reminded me of some other books on my list - The Unaccountability Machine in particular, which explored the way Management Cybernetics describes systems as a series of information flows which bypass human agency, and can lead to the production of “accountability sinks”, neat little dead ends where bad decisions can be made in the name of the system without any individual taking ownership. In education, it speaks to our eagerness to devolve responsibility to some outside agency, some repository of “official” and “scientific” measurement - an exam board, Ofsted, PISA, a wellbeing survey - rather than standing our ground and making a human, moral judgement about what education is and should be.

I’m not uncritical of Postman. As I often feel when reading works by theorists, the practical part of me that spends every day thinking about how to run a school wants to turn round and give him fifteen examples of human judgement that might have been improved by a little Scientism. But he has landed on something that is more than a little unsettling. In a world untainted by the '“technopoly” he describes, would education be a matter of human judgement and teacher agency? Would it be a moral journey, with teachers imparting wisdom and judgement alongside knowledge?

I’m pretty sure of the answer. It’s a pretty annoying answer, though, just to warn you.

It depends.

It depends on the teachers, the students, the culture they live in. Because for all the issues Postman takes with educational research, it has one vital element which is invaluable. It cuts through assumption. By stating the obvious clearly, it avoids us getting caught in the trap of our own individual experience. Postman picks apart Scientism well - but he pays less attention to the possibility of errors of moral judgement.

Some teachers would thrive in a world of individual accountability and autonomy. But some would create schools like we used to have, where whole tranches of students were dismissed as unworthy. And that brings me back to where we started. Have things got worse? If so, why?

The word we need to think about here is “worse.” Because in one sense, we do need to take stock and say, clearly, that some things are much better than they used to be. Take violence in schools. If you want a snapshot of the level of violence in the idyllic, pre-lapsarian world of education in the 50s, read Just William. The amount of fights that kid gets into should shock us all. It’s not just him, either. The glorification of violence in Dennis the Menace with his brutal bullying of Walter “The Softy” continued right through the eighties and nineties. And, in more real world evidence, even as a full-on nerd I used to get in fights pretty regularly in primary and secondary, while neither of my children have ever been the recipient of any violence at all.

You might say, where’s the evidence? But, anecdotal as what I’ve said it, there can be no more rigorous analysis. Because there is no fixed point. None of the measures we could look to - exclusions, surveys, behaviour data from schools - has stood still. As a case in point, I was in an (excellent) CPD session about racism the other day, in which we saw data about the increase in racist exclusions over the last five years. Which, of course, mainly told us that schools were more willing to exclude for racist incidents, and that racism was noticed in a way it had not been before.

There are other measures that might be easier to explore over time. Literacy, or attendance at sixth form. But even there, the idea of an increase or a decline is wrapped up in the simple passage of time, and the consequent changing of the concept being measured.

Literacy is the example I am most concerned with right now. Its easy to think that the ability to read and write is a measurable binary. But it isn’t. There is a level of skill on a continuum, but there is also a change in what it means. We read and write differently now - faster, skimming online texts, tapping out messages, using changing vocabulary and levels of formality. Even something as timeless as an essay on poetry is different, with different expectations around the vocabulary one should know and the type of analysis one should carry out. Fewer children might never read and write, but fewer do it a lot.

None of this means we should give up on the idea of finding our clock - our fixed point. Nor does it mean we stop striving to improve. But it does make me think of the work of Svetlana Alexievich, whose books are amongst the most profound things I have ever read. They explore the history of the Soviet Union and Belarus, and consist almost entirely of oral testimony. In “The Unwomanly Face of War”, she explains her methodology. She says that people dismiss the testimonies of ordinary people as inaccurate or insubstantial, but that her response is that “in each of us there is a small piece of history.” . Its easy to look at history and see the actions of great men or the sweep of economic change - but that the substance of history, the raw material, is lives. She says “together we write the book of time”, and in the same way I would suggest that together we write the book of education.

What do I mean by that? Well, I mean that the child in front of you is the substance of everything you do. All the metrics and research may guide you, but it should never blind you to the simple truth that their life is complex and unique, and that they are the only fixed point you can hold on to. The constructs of our discipline might be a map, but the child is the actual ground beneath your feet. Have you made that child’s life better? If so, well done. Now on to the next one.

None of this helps the policy people. Or the macro-economists. Or the philosophers of education. But that’s why, despite my fascination with the world of research, I’ve spent twenty five years in the classroom.

Because, frankly, it’s easier.